I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it’s a pretty decent source of sneers. This month’s contains: “The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin”. In classic Moldbug fashion, it’s Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I’ll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

26:23 –

Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that’s simple and easy to use that’s not a small amount of of work

Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

30:17 – a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You’re the cream of the crop.

~2:00:00 – here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as “oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy” and responding by saying “nuh uh, urbit is decentralized.” Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

Nope, actually this used to work but the genius computer scientists at Boeing put the cockpit in a random place around the cabin, thwarting most pilot overwrite attacks.

be real with me, are you just pretending to be this stupid?

Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.

I usually can’t stand radio-style podcasters but these guys are just too good. The way they play off each other is top notch.

Yeah, my initial reaction was “how dare pg not follow his own principles” but then I realized he’s on Twitter, not HN, and when in Rome…

my man have you ever been in, like, another country?

crypto/blockchain UX quality is strongly correlated with risk of getting all your tokens stolen.

I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I’m beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of “note” to notice them.

Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.

This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.

Is he ever going to specify which booster? If he refused Tdap he is a menace to society not because of risk of tetanus but spreading pertussis to the vulnerable.

Still, anyone that took him seriously before this should be embarrassed.

prompt injection in insurance claims time?

global southerner? edit: nah I don’t like it.

oof. Something tells me he’s a good guy and just knee-jerked that response without thinking about it. But then I realize it doesn’t matter because the kind of community you create doesn’t depend on who you are deep down but what you say publicly.

Ladybird isn’t going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and they’re not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but there’s no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.

The “Thank you Grock” at the bottom made my day

hello from the other side

that sounds like a super pleasant and stable molecule

How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply… built different?

Thanks for the suggestions. The LLM is free to use (for now) so I thought I’d poke it and see how much I should actually be paying attention to these things this time around.

Here are its answers. I can’t figure out how to share chats from this god-awful garbage UI so you’ll just have to trust me or try it yourself.

1. It gives the correct but unnecessary answer: “If I were to ask you which door leads to freedom, which door would you point to?” It also mentions a lying guard but also acknowledges that it’s absent from this specific problem.
2. “A table or a chair”
3. Completely fails on this one, it missed the sentence “Everyone knows the color of their eyes”
4. Not sure what to do with this
5. “While a Hadamard matrix of order 2672 might exist, its existence isn’t immediately provable using the most common constructions” – I won’t pretend to know anything about the Hadamard conjecture if that’s a real thing so I have no idea what it’s on about here.

edit: I didn’t do any prompt engineering, just straight copy paste.

I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and … it’s actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better? It passed the “nonsense river challenge” and the “how many sisters does the brother have” tests, both of which fooled gpt4.